You can now send money through Google Assistant

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Google Assistant, Google's virtual voice assistant, now supports voice-enabled peer-to-peer (P2P) payments made with Google Pay, the company's own mobile wallet, which was recently rebranded from Android Pay, according to The Verge.

Users can tell Assistant to send money through Google Pay — the recipient needs to have a Google Pay account too — and then authenticate the transaction using their phone with a fingerprint or by entering their Google password. Users who don't have a Google Pay account will be prompted to set one up the first time they initiate a transfer. The firm indicated that voice payments will also come to the Google Home smart speakers "in the coming months."

Leveraging the Google Assistant could help Google Pay improve its competitive positioning.

A voice-enabled P2P feature could bring users to Google Pay. The P2P market is growing: Business Insider Intelligence estimates that mobile P2P volume will hit $336 billion in 2021, up from $19 billion six years earlier. And voice payments are on the rise as well — US voice payment usage is expected to grow fivefold through 2022 — at the same time that popular voice assistants like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa have added or are exploring P2P capabilities. Assistant has a wide user base, as it's installed on 400 million devices, comes pre-installed on Android phones, and has an iOS app, so it could be a popular use case for P2P because of its convenience and simplicity. That could bring more customers to Google Pay.

That, in turn, could help Google Pay's performance overall. Google Pay is sorely in need of growth. But Android Pay's recent rebrand to Google Pay, which made numerous improvements, likely won't be enough on its own for the mobile payment offering to see a sudden increase in adoption. Just 11% of eligible customers had tried Android Pay, making it the lowest-adopted of the three major phone-based services when compared with Samsung Pay and Apple Pay. The service also counted the worst engagement rates among these players. If the convenience of voice-based P2P draws more people to Google Pay — which requires the payment sender and recipient to be onboarded — that could increase the number of customers who test the wallet for other use cases, like in-store payments.